Special Report.

Meetings, Coding And A Pull-out Bed

February 12, 1999|By Jason Compton. Special to the Tribune.

What would it be like to spend a day as Mark Turmell, veteran arcade game developer? How about this: You start your day with a session in a motion-capture studio trying to get a local basketball player to execute a pass just the right way.

Follow that up with a long round-table discussion on the pros and cons of allowing violent contact in a roundball video game. Having settled that, check in with the members of your team and sort out any issues that have come up in the past 24 hours. Maybe by 7 p.m. or so you can sit down and write some code.

Don't bother packing up once the clock strikes 12-you're sleeping in your office tonight. Good thing everyone around here has a pull-out bed.

Welcome to Turmell's world at Midway Games Inc. The scenario above is real. Turmell, 35, is a lead designer for the company and the mastermind behind an honor roll of arcade classics: Smash TV, NBA Jam, NBA Hangtime and NFL Blitz. We caught up with him at his Chicago office last month when his latest project, NBA Showtime: The NBA on NBC, was barely a week and a half away from its world premiere in London.

Turmell has been developing video games since 1980, when now-defunct Sirius Software published Sneakers for the Apple II. After a string of hits on that platform, he went on to develop games for the Atari 2600 and Commodore 64. Later he worked on cutting-edge gaming research projects and finally landed at Midway Games (then Williams Electronics) in 1989. His first game for Williams, Smash TV, was an unqualified success.

Turmell calls himself a "project leader/designer/programmer" but sees himself as referee of the game-design process. "Ideas are the easiest part," he said. "People put their ideas on the table. I'm the guy who keeps the ideas in a pile, throwing out the ideas that aren't popular with the team and lobbying for the ideas that make sense," Turmell said.

Along with playing referee, he does double duty as a field general.

"Making a game is a war. There's a lot of arguing that goes into making a video game." Hence the real-life conflict over whether NBA Showtime should allow flagrant, violent shoving of another player at any point during the game.

Although physical play was a significant part of NBA Jam, passions ran hot as to how much shoving and violence should be allowed in the new title. Turmell had to guide his team to a decision that couldn't wait-the debut was just 11 days away.

Turmell clearly enjoys his life's work of creating fun diversions for others. But it's definitely work.

You think you have crunch time? "People here work 14-hour days, seven days a week for the last eight weeks of a project," he said. That's just the culmination of a project that might have seven or eight people working together for almost two years on a single goal-the release of a video game to the arcades.

And Turmell has to keep them focused and happy. "Nobody's going to work 80-hour weeks if they don't feel they're part of the process, if they don't feel their ideas are being given a shot," Turmell said.

In this area, he gets help from project co-designer Sal Divita. The two work together during the day to coordinate the team and sort out issues, sitting down to write code only in the evening when things have settled down.

That's not to say developing video games doesn't offer fun in exchange for all that hard work. And when it is fun, it's the kind of fun one can have at almost no other job. For instance, there was the business of NBA Jam and its famous secret codes.

"We put in the secret NBA Jam codes at the last minute," Turmell said. "We digitized our own heads as an afterthought and put them on the players." Whenever a player activates the codes, they get the superhuman Midway design team in place of the regular NBA players.

When the secret of the codes leaked out, it spread like wildfire through the Internet and online services, and the team had to answer for the presence of hidden characters with superhuman abilities in the game. Arcade managers were upset because, in theory anyway, more powerful players meant kids could play longer before having to insert that next coin. In the end, the game's overwhelming success buried the flap over the codes, and now secret codes are a part of almost every arcade game, Turmell said.

Other conflicts didn't go away so easily and have required Turmell to make tough choices on short notice.

"When we got the go-ahead from the NFL for NFL Blitz, we asked them what we could do with the players in terms of knocking them down and knocking them around," Turmell said. "They said, 'You make the game; you're the best at this. We're not going to tell you what to do.' "

What Midway made was a game that featured just about every imaginable form of gridiron carnage short of blood-gushing wounds. Because they had just created the WWF Wrestlemania game, Turmell and his team had a staggering array of super-violent tackles, knockdowns and bone-crushing hits.

At the last minute, the NFL reconsidered its position. "Five days before shipping--after the game's test market--the NFL came in and said, 'You can't have this violence. If you want to ship this game, take our name off of it,' " Turmell said. "We had to decide in a 48-hour period what course to take ... and it was my decision to make."

Weighing the potential popularity of an ultra-violent football game against the strength of the NFL license, Turmell ultimately led the team to strip the game of the most offensive moves, and NFL Blitz was shipped.

Turmell pointed out that even the watered-down version has received some criticism for its hard-hitting play.

Still, Turmell loves what he does. Not even Microsoft's Bill Gates, who years ago offered him a job at Microsoft, could steer Turmell away from the video game world.

"I probably would have steered them into games," Turmell joked. "There may never have been a Windows!"